A war on the Nile pushes Sudan toward the abyss
Source: Oman Observer
KHARTOUM, Sudan: The gold market is a graveyard of rubble and dog-eaten corpses. The state TV station became a torture chamber. The national film archive was blown open in battle.
Artillery shells soar over the Nile, smashing into hospitals and houses. Residents bury their dead outside their front doors. Others join civilian militias. In a hushed famine ward, starving babies fight for life. Every few days, one of them dies.
Khartoum, the capital of Sudan and one of the largest cities in Africa, has been reduced to a charred battleground. A feud between two generals fighting for power has dragged the country into civil war and turned the city into ground zero for one of the world's worst humanitarian catastrophes.
As many as 150,000 people have died since the conflict erupted last year, by American estimates. An additional 9 million have been forced from their homes, making Sudan home to the largest displacement crisis on Earth, the United Nations says. A famine looms that officials warn could kill hundreds of thousands of children in the coming months.
Fueling the chaos, Sudan has become a playground for foreign players like the United Arab Emirates, Iran, Russia and its Wagner mercenaries, and even a few Ukrainian special forces. They are all part of a volatile stew of outside interests pouring weapons or fighters into the conflict and hoping to grab the spoils of war -- Sudan's gold, for instance, or its perch on the Red Sea.
The war erupted in April 2023, when a standoff between Sudan's military and a powerful paramilitary group it helped create -- the Rapid Support Forces -- burst into gunfire on the streets of Khartoum.
Almost immediately, the fighting ripped across Khartoum and far beyond. Sudanese have been stunned by the destruction, but neither side looks capable of victory, and the war is metastasizing into a devastating free-for-all.
Another genocide now threatens Darfur, the region that became synonymous with war crimes two decades ago. The health system is crumbling. And a plethora of armed groups has piled into the fight.
With U.S.-led peace talks stalled, the Sudanese state is collapsing and threatening to drag down a fragile region with it. Experts say it is a matter of time before one of Sudan's many neighbors, like Chad, Eritrea or South Sudan, gets sucked in.
The conflict has global ramifications. Iran, already allied with the Houthis in Yemen, is now backing military forces on both sides of the Red Sea. Europeans fear a wave of Sudanese migrants heading for their shores. A recent U.S. intelligence assessment warned that a lawless Sudan could become a haven for "terrorist and criminal networks."
Gunfire and mortars splashed into the waters around Col. Osman Taha, a badly wounded officer in the Sudanese military, as he crossed the Nile in November. Around him, he recalled, other wounded soldiers huddled in the boat, hoping to avoid being hit again. Several died.
Taha made it to the far bank, and five days later his right leg was amputated. As he recovered in a military hospital overlooking the Nile, he said, shells slammed into its walls, fired by the Rapid Support Forces across the river. Patients moved their beds to avoid being hit as artillery fell.
Relief came in February when the military, armed with powerful new Iranian drones, recaptured this part of the city. (By contrast, the RSF uses drones supplied by the United Arab Emirates).
The military's advance allowed hundreds of wounded troops to be evacuated by air to Port Sudan, where they lie in the crowded wards of a military hospital.
The evacuees included Taha, who sat up in his bed to show a series of videos that he took during his last battle. Jubilant soldiers can be seen whooping and hugging, thinking they have won. Bleeding RSF fighters lie in the dust, and are kicked or taunted by the soldiers.
But the soldiers had missed one RSF fighter, a sniper hidden in a residential block, and he shot Taha in the leg. Later that night, he said, medics moved him to an ammunition factory beside the Nile, where they embarked on their perilous crossing.
He was pessimistic the war would end anytime soon.
"Guns can't solve this problem," he said. "We need to talk peace."
To Amna Amin, war means hunger.
After Rapid Support Forces fighters swept into her part of Omdurman, one of the three cities that make up greater Khartoum, Amin, 36, had no way to feed her five children.
Her husband, a gold miner in the north, had vanished. She lost her job as a cleaner. Neighbors shared what they could, but it wasn't enough. And soon she had two more mouths to feed: Iman and Ayman, twins born in September.
Within months, the twins started losing weight and suffering diarrhea, classic signs of malnutrition. Panicking, Amin bundled her children in her arms and made a desperate dash across the front line to reach Al Buluk children's hospital, the last place they might be saved.
The United Nations has yet to officially declare a famine in Sudan, but few experts doubt that one is already underway in parts of Darfur and in Khartoum.
More than 220,000 children could die in the coming months alone, the U.N. says. And both sides use hunger as a weapon of war, aid officials say. The army withholds visas, travel permits and permission to cross the front lines. Rapid Support Forces fighters have looted aid trucks and warehouses and raised their own obstacles.
"One of the most horrific situations on Earth is on a trajectory to get far, far worse," said Tom Perriello, the U.S. envoy for Sudan.
The hospitals still functioning are strained to the point of collapse. Every day hundreds of new patients arrive at Al Nau hospital, near the front line in Omdurman. Many sleep two to a bed.
Patients spoke of pinballing from one neighborhood to another as the front line shifts, running a gantlet of checkpoints defended by fighters who demand money, steal phones and sometimes open fire.
Mudassir Ibrahim, 50, lifted his shirt to show welts across his back -- evidence, he said, of a week spent in RSF detention inside the headquarters of Sudan's national radio and television station. His captors beat him with iron rods and electrical cables, he said: "It felt like death a thousand times over."
At the television station in Omdurman, we saw evidence to back his claims. Ropes and other restraints hung from barred rooms in the finance department. Piles of dry excrement were scattered on the floor. Filthy walls were scrawled with names, pleas and snatches of poetry.
Most of the compound stood in ruins. Its main building had been incinerated by airstrikes, while a film archive dating to the 1940s, one of the largest in Africa, had been blown open by gunfire. The RSF had retreated across the river, soldiers said, but some left behind their own wartime wisdom.
"As long as death is certain," read a line scrawled on one wall, "don't live like a coward." (The RSF did not respond to the allegations of torture and other abuses by its fighters).
Hundreds of black-clad young women marched through a schoolyard in Omdurman early one morning, the latest recruits in a rapidly expanding conflict.
The war started as a dispute between two men -- Sudan's army chief, Gen. Abdel-Fattah Burhan, and the Rapid Support Forces leader, Lt. Gen. Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo. But since last fall, when a succession of RSF victories set off widespread alarm, a proliferation of armed groups has joined the fight, mostly backing the military.
Wooden crates lay scattered across the weapons depot next to an abandoned RSF base. Any identifying marks -- serial numbers or other clues that showed who had supplied the weapons -- had been carefully scraped off. The foreign powers fueling Sudan's war seemed to be covering their tracks.
Yet traces remain.
U.S. officials have grown increasingly critical of the United Arab Emirates, the war's biggest foreign sponsor. It has extensive gold and agricultural interests in Sudan, and before the war signed a deal to build a $6 billion port on the Red Sea. Since last year, it has smuggled weapons to the RSF through a base in Chad, in breach of a U.N. arms embargo, The New York Times reported.
Egypt, by contrast, has backed Sudan's military. But it is the army's recent turn to Iran for drones and other weapons that has caused alarm in Washington, several Western officials said.
Russia seems to have helped both sides.
Earlier in the war, Wagner mercenaries supplied the RSF with anti-aircraft missiles, U.N. investigators say. Russians later traveled to Khartoum, where they trained fighters to shoot down Sudanese military warplanes, said two senior Sudanese officials who provided the Russians' names and details of their movements.
Today, nearly two dozen Wagner operatives remain in the capital, flying drones and firing mortars for the RSF, the Sudanese said. The Russian presence even spurred Ukraine to deploy a small team of special forces to counter its nemesis abroad by helping the Sudanese military in Khartoum.
The foreign meddling is frustrating U.S.- and Saudi-led diplomacy to reach a cease-fire, though critics say even those efforts to save Sudan have been shamefully weak. The country, they warn, is barreling into a protracted conflict that could lead to anarchy or rival fiefs, like Somalia in the 1990s or Libya after 2011.
The war could easily spill beyond Sudan's borders. It is already causing tensions inside the security services of Chad and has cut off vital oil revenues for South Sudan. Now it risks sucking in Ethiopia, Africa's second-most populous country.
Sudanese officials accuse Ethiopia of backing the RSF. Meanwhile, Eritrea, Ethiopia's traditional enemy, has sided with Sudan's military. And thousands of rebels from Ethiopia's restive Tigray region are stationed at a camp in eastern Sudan, officials and aid groups said -- part of a combustible mix that threatens to open a new front in the war.
Some Sudanese in exile desperately want the outside world to intervene. But so far, they say, it's only made things worse.
"It's sheer madness," said Ibrahim Elbadawi, a former economy minister now in Cairo, calling for a U.N. peacekeeping force to save his country from collapse.